The writings and career of Bolingbroke make a far weaker impression upon posterity than they made on contemporaries. His genius and character were superficial; his abilities were exercised upon ephemeral objects, and not inspired by lasting or universal ideas. Bute and George III. indeed derived their political ideas from The Patriot King, but the influence which he is said to have exercised upon Voltaire, Gibbon and Burke is very problematical. Burke wrote his Vindication of Natural Society in imitation of Bolingbroke’s style, but in refutation of his principles; and in the Reflections on the French Revolution he exclaims, “Who now reads Bolingbroke, who ever read him through?” Burke denies that Bolingbroke’s words left “any permanent impression on his mind.” Bolingbroke’s conversation, described by Lord Chesterfield as “such a flowing happiness of expression that even his most familiar conversations if taken down in writing would have borne the press without the least correction,” his delightful companionship, his wit, good looks, and social qualities which charmed during his lifetime and made firm friendships with men of the most opposite character, can now only be faintly imagined. His most brilliant gift was his eloquence, which according to Swift was acknowledged by men of all factions to be unrivalled. None of his great orations has survived, a loss regretted by Pitt more than that of the missing books of Livy and Tacitus, and no art perishes more completely with its possessor than that of oratory. His political works, in which the expression is often splendidly eloquent, spirited and dignified, are for the most part exceedingly rhetorical in style, while his philosophical essays were undertaken with the chief object of displaying his eloquence, and no characteristic renders writings less readable for posterity. They are both deficient in solidity and in permanent interest. The first deals with mere party questions without sincerity and without depth; and the second, composed as an amusement in retirement without any serious preparation, in their attacks on metaphysics and theology and in their feeble deism present no originality and carry no conviction. Both kinds reflect in their Voltairian superficiality Bolingbroke’s manner of life, which was throughout uninspired by any great ideas or principles and thoroughly false and superficial. Though a libertine and a free-thinker, he had championed the most bigoted and tyrannical high-church measures. His diplomacy had been subordinated to party necessities. He had supported by turns and simultaneously Jacobite and Hanoverian interests. He had only conceived the idea of The Patriot King in the person of the worthless Frederick in order to stir up sedition, while his eulogies on retirement and study were pronounced from an enforced exile. He only attacked party government because he was excluded from it, and only railed at corruption because it was the corruption of his antagonists and not his own. His public life presents none of those acts of devotion and self-sacrifice which often redeem a career characterized by errors, follies and even crimes.
One may deplore his unfortunate history and wasted genius, but it is impossible to regret his exclusion from the government of England. He was succeeded in the title as 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, according to the special remainder, by his nephew Frederick, 3rd Viscount St John (a title granted to Bolingbroke’s father in 1716), from whom the title has descended.
Bibliography.—Bolingbroke’s collected works, including his chief political writings already mentioned and his philosophical essays Concerning the Nature, Extent and Reality of Human Knowledge, On the Folly and Presumption of Philosophers, On the Rise and Progress of Monotheism, and On Authority in Matters of Religion, were first published in Mallet’s faulty edition in 1754,—according to Johnson’s well-known denunciation, “the blunderbuss charged against religion and morality,”—and subsequently in 1778, 1809 and 1841. A Collection of Political Tracts by Bolingbroke was published in 1748. His Letters were published by G. Parke in 1798, and by Grimoard, Lettres historiques, politiques, philosophiques, &c., in 1808; for others see Pope’s and Swift’s Correspondence; W. Coxe’s Walpole; Phillimore’s Life of Lyttelton; Hardwick State Papers, vol. ii.; Marchmont Papers, ed. by Sir G.H. Rose (1831); Letters to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in Add. MSS. Brit. Museum (see Index, 1894-1899), mostly transcribed by W. Sichel; Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of Marquis of Bath, Duke of Portland at Welbeck; while a further collection of his letters relating to the treaty of Utrecht is in the British Museum. For his attempts at verse see Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors (1806), iv. 209 et seq. See also bibliography of his works in Sichel, ii. 456, 249.
A life of Bolingbroke appeared in his lifetime about 1740, entitled Authentic Memoirs (in the Grenville Library, Brit. Mus.), which recounted his escapades; other contemporary accounts were published in 1752 and 1754, and a life by Goldsmith in 1770. Of the more modern biographies may be noted that in the Dict. of Nat. Biog. by Sir Leslie Stephen, 1897; by C. de Remusat in L’Angleterre au 18me siècle (1856), vol. i.; by T. Macknight (1863); by J. Churton Collins (1886); by A. Hassall (1889); and by Walter Sichel (1901-1902), elaborate and brilliant, but unduly eulogistic.
(P. C. Y.)
[1] Swift’s Inquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry; Mrs Delaney’s Correspondence, 2 ser., iii. 168.
[2] Berwick’s Mem. (Petitot), vol. lxvi. 219.
[3] Hist. MSS. Comm., Portland MSS. v. 235.
[4] Stuart MSS. (Roxburghe Club), ii. 383.